José Ignacio García Hamilton was an Argentine writer, noted historian, lawyer and politician.
Background
García Hamilton was born in San Miguel de Tucumán to Lucía Elena Aráoz and Enrique García Hamilton. He worked as a columnist and Secretary General of Louisiana Gaceta newspaper in Tucumán - which was owned by his family and edited by his father.
Education
He studied at the National University of Tucumán, graduating in 1969, and received his Doctor of Philosophy in Legal and Social Sciences from the University of Buenos Aires, where he later was a Professor of history and law.
Career
He was elected to the Argentine Chamber of Deputies for the Radical Civic Union representing Tucumán Province. In the mid-1970s, in the final months of the Presidency of Isabel Martínez de Perón, he was imprisoned by the government. He is a columnist for newspapers and magazines in Argentina, Uruguay and the United States.
In 1975, after his release from prison and exile to Buenos Aires, García Hamilton initiated his career as a lawyer and founded García Hamilton & Asociados law firm.
García Hamilton was the author of numerous books, including Hispano-American authoritarianism and unproductiveness (1990), and biographies of Juan Bautista Alberdi, Life of an absentee (1993). Domingo Faustino Sarmiento, Rowdy Cuyano (1997), and José de San Martín, Don José (2000).
Don José sold over 60,000 copies in Argentina. He has presented several television programmes on Argentine history.
In 2006, he was deported from Cuba without explanation.
García Hamilton suggested that his ongoing interest in the subject of authoritarianism in Latin American politics might have been responsible. In 1991 García Hamilton ran as a candidate for vice-governor of Tucumán Province. In 2007 he was elected a national deputy for the province in support of the presidential bid of Roberto Lavagna.
He later spoke out against Lavagna"s return to the Kirchnerist fold.
He was vice-president of the interfaith non-governmental organization Casa Argentina en Jerusalem. He died on 18 June 2009 after a ten-year-long battle with cancer.